Re: non-recursive automake advice?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, tom fogal wrote:

> So I've been convinced that the effort involved in changing a build
> system to not use recursive make is worth it, and I was wondering if

A noble objective.

> Unfortunately in the 'Inc.am' files I need to remember to qualify every
> filename with not just '$(srcdir)', but
> '$(srcdir)/modules_directory_name/'.  This is only a minor annoyance
> and definitely worth the trouble, but perhaps I am missing something?
>
> Anyway my real issue is that I just can't get the build system to find
> the module-archives correctly.  If I do (for example):

Any Automake target name which would contain directory separators 
needs to have the directories separators replaced with underscores in 
the name.  This can be painful.  Also keep in mind that regardless of 
inclusion, Automake is not going to treat content differently based on 
where it is included from.  Therefore, your sub-directory Makefile.am 
files are going to have to know that they are located in a 
sub-directory and need to use "full paths" from the directory where 
the top Makefile.am is located.

> Am I going about this completely the wrong way?  Is there some software
> I can look at for an example of a 'correct' way to do this?

Development GraphicsMagick 1.2 does use a completely non-recursive 
build.  It uses Automake includes to include per-subdirectory .am 
files as you mention.  A tarball may be downloaded from 
"ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/snapshots/"; or you 
may look at the Makefile.am files via cvsweb at 
"http://cvs.graphicsmagick.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/GraphicsMagick/";.

You will notice that the Makefile.am files don't use += at all.  I 
don't know that there is anything wrong with using += but I felt more 
secure with using named variables and explicit concatenation for 
everything since I could be absolutely sure about ordering.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/